Week 26 - One Bite

I'm up to date on the challenges and for the most part, did them in order, but I can't seem to finish these posts in order! Anyway, here's Week 26.

Since I usually make challenge meals for dinner, the Week 26 challenge, one bite, led to a bunch of logistical questions. Most hors d'oeuvres don't have lots of vegetables, so would I be able to fit them in with protein and starch? How would I get hors d'oeuvres to be filling enough for dinner for the 2 of us without getting bored? In the end, I decided that they just wouldn't be enough and we'd have to eat something else on the side. What I ended up choosing was crab toast, an adaptation based on this recipe I found on Serious Eats from a Jean-Georges cookbook, which was already a home adaptation of the ABC Kitchen crab toast that made both of our favorites lists back in 2011. We loved that crab toast, so we hoped we'd like this one too.

I skipped a couple of steps by using bottled sriracha mayo, but I couldn't see making my own when we already had this bottle in the pantry (free from a fundraiser). So the ingredients I used were:

- 3 slices of sourdough bread ($0.50)

- 6 oz can of crab meat ($1.99)

- 3 spoonfuls of sriracha mayo ($0)

- 1 scallion, chopped ($0.15)

- crushed red pepper flakes to taste ($0.05)

- lemon juice to taste ($0.10)

- black pepper to taste ($0.05)

Using canned crab and free sriracha mayo brought the total cost of this part of our meal to less than $3. We ate it with the 5 cheese Greek spiral we picked up from TJ's so it was a pretty cheap dinner. Our original plan was to eat it with an arugula and beet salad, which would have been much healthier, but the Greek spiral cover opened up in transport (you can read more about that here) so we had to eat it sooner rather than later.

Making the crab toast was really easy. I cut up the sourdough slices into smaller, "bite size" pieces (although for me some of them were more like 2 bites), and toasted them for 5 minutes or so in a 350 degree oven while I made the crab topping.

To make the crab part, I just put together the crab, scallions, sriracha mayo, pepper, chili flakes, and lemon juice in a bowl, and mixed them together well. Once that was ready and the toast had cooled for a few minutes, I topped the toast pieces with the crab mixture. For once, I estimated things correctly as the crab topping made with 1 can of crab meat matched up almost perfectly with 3 slices of bread.

The crab toasts were pretty good, but not amazing. They were light and refreshing, definitely helped along by the scallions that weren't in the original recipe. I'm sure they would have been better with freshly made sriracha mayo and crab that didn't come from a can, but it worked for the challenge. That said, I'm not sure if I would make these again for dinner. They were fine, but making little one bite pieces really isn't an extra step I want to take when trying to get dinner on the table during a weeknight.